Much trauma is caused by unfair uses of power in groups, particularly by moderators of online communities, who often act with unfair bias. This is a place to make such cases known to try to deter them from happening.

Monthly Archives: January 2017

A sad failure of a promotional group for a cause, to be more than a self-interested publicity machine and to actually support its own cause when a connected issue arises.

Europa United is a pro-EU site, by its own description “a media portal dedicated to the European project and institutions. All our articles and opinion pieces are our own publications.”

Its Facebook page is full of feelgood posts about Europe and the bonds betwen EU countries, dedicated to showing exactly what Britain is now set to lose, and dissuading others from following. Its main stock content is photos of open borders. Often it shows photos simply of particular cities and the day’s weather in them. It has welcomed and been interested in topical comments on politics, when it has made posts following developments with Brexit or with Scotland’s difficulty.

Yet it chose to wipe a post about the Gatwick Airport scandal.

Airport fairness, trustability to use airports without risk of costly disaster, is directly to do with barriers between countries. It concerns travel between EU members, and particularly between its island members and the continent. Unjust practice in the airport boarding process adds to barriers between countries, deters travel, so helps to pull Europe apart and works against what Europa United wants. Yet they have decided to hold that this is not an EU issue, and to call themselves not the right place for it. Even though they admit the scandal needs publicising!!

This is completely contradictory of their own cause. It shows the cynical pattern seen too often in politics, which contributes to distrust in politics which we know was a cause of the vote for Brexit. Publicity machines that just want to publicise a calculated package of feelgood stuff to and don’t want to deal with ordinary society’s real problems or take positions on them. Even when taking positions on them directly advances their own cause, it is a terrain outside their self-interested comfort zone.

Compare it with, indeed, posting about it on here when you might ssk what directly it has to do with autism. It has to do with the Gatwick airport scandal, the previous item posted here, and that had partly to do with attitudes to autism, and to groups of air psssengers who need tolerant handling and clarity.

DisdainIng like this the real practical grassroots problems faced in holding the EU together, indicates to grassroots society not to trust them. Not to suppose they have anything worth hearing. It is actively counterproductive to popularising the EU, for a publicity machine to exist that is not willing to get into consumer pressure to solve grassroots practical problems with European ties. Until they change their character it is there for their foes the Brexiters to seize on and make campaigning capital from. That is what they have chosen instead of SIMPLY to do consumer good in defence their own ordinary supporters’ practical access to the European ties it wanted to encourage them to value !!!!!!!!

TripAdvisor is the great democratic platform for travellers against bad travel businesses that would maltreat us, right? NO. This link, TripAdvisor Warning, for the businesses that get reviewed on TripAdvisor, the hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions etc, defence always matters, see what it says in their defence, about how malicious reviewing can be done without adequate means for its targets to fight back. Look at its story of a man libelled with a malicious paedo accusation for a year, ignored by TripAdvisor until he obtained campaigning help to confront them with. Then it got taken straight off the site.

Now consider autistic spectrumites, with challenges of following instructions literally to the letter and affected by big crowd situations, travelling by air. Using airports, going through the complex airport process that precedes boarding a flight and requires arriving there hours ahead of the departure time, unlike any other mode of transport. Autism Network Scotland‘s new book Ordinary Life Too [PDF link] has a chapter on confidence to travel, and mentions airport support services that now exist for us at Edinburgh and Glasgow. A recent innovation. The need for them has surely been apparent for near 20 years of growing spectrum awareness? – unless it has been triggered by a worsening of what happens at airports, an increased crowding and busying of the boarding process resulting in allowing jncreased risk of injustice to passengers.

That picture is strongly suggested by the experience quoted HERE BELOW, and for some time rudely deleted where it had been posted on TripAdvisor’s forum, as recently as Dec 20 at Gatwick airport. A family with small kids, there 2 hours in time exactly as their airline had advised, got caught in a slow moving queue for families when going through airport security. It resulted in them only emerging from the security process 5 minutes after the boarding gate for their flight had closed, and nobody stopped this happening. THEY WERE ACTUALLY LEFT TO MISS THEIR FLIGHT by failure of the airport process to handle them fairly, WHICH WAS NOT THEIR FAULT. And airport security is done by a different company than the airlines, apparently without responsibility to cooperate in getting passengers through successfully every time.

Now look at the later pages of that topic, from page 7. (Granted an attitude dismissing Asperger’s as a “medical problem” has been deleted.) Look at all the aggressive macho travellers who persist in blaming the victims of airport delays for being late, ignoring that travel delays that are not your fault exist, and the sheer bigotry of persistently calling it “personal responsibility” not to be in a situation that they know it is possible to be in not by your fault !!! THUGS like this, who blatantly care nothing for other travellers’ wellbeing and actively wish upon them risk of disaster, actively wish for brutally selfish dangerous treacherous transport systems without responsibility to every passenger and intolerant of their needs, including of autistic needs. This is the TripAdvisor forum community. Polar opposite in character, to the entire supposed point of TripAdvisor’s existence.

An insightful poster in a topic about TripAdvisor’s quality has explained what is likely happening in the airports topic. The loudmouths may well not be genuinely ordinary passengers at all, but plants working for unscrupulous airlines to keep a dangerous bullying status quo in existence: “I find this very typical, mostly on air travel related topics. Discussions are usually dominated by industry people who will never give the poster any sympathy and just remind him that the only obligation of the airline as per its contract is to take you from point A to point B, eventually.”

This explains why the loudmouths are all so right wing. Their persistent unreasonable talk of “responsibility” not to be late and blatant ignoring of the reality that travel problems not your fault can make you late, is exactly like anti-welfare bigots who ignore that jobs are not available on demand and want to believe that not having them is a choice. Exactly like hate manipulated by the moneyed tabloud papers. The public need to know that the TripAdvisor forums’ voice is not their own voice, that the section on air travel has been swamped and taken over by agents for the sharky airlines’ business interest. They can get posts that stand up to them wiped, for it’s worth knowing too that TripAdvisor’s workings are mostly automated and it’s automated to wipe any post that receives a certain number of reports, without anyone looking at it consciously.

As of Jan 6, something has happened very quickly, that strongly evidences this theory of control by airline insiders – TA HAS DELETED THE ORIGINAL STORY OF THE INJUSTICE AT GATWICK! Insulted the person who wrote it, with the standard blurb that the community found it inappropriate – the community being a minimum number of airline insiders reporting the post, without any facility for other members to come and defend it. It was appropriate for any caring and careful traveller.

Thus TripAdvisor, claiming to be the global site to help travellers, helped the air travel industry to maltreat and rip off the public, by wiping the following story which greatly concerns any sensible public. This story’s sharing here is unauthorised, to undo the injustice on TA: but remember it had been shared publicly already on TA, and is about an unnamed family, so is reasonable to post here for the moment. Whether or not the verbatim story can be kept, its consumer details will be kept here.

Missed flights – Gatwick family security lane chaos

On 20 December 2016 my family of 4 (me, my partner our 4-year-old twin boys), and 3 other families travelling with small children had to be escorted back through Gatwick passport control and customs as a result of our all having missed our flights. 3 of us were with Easy Jet and 1 with Air Lingus.

Like others, we had arrived at the airport 2 hours before scheduled take-off as advised, and we entered the family section of security control over an hour before departure. We were held up in the family section for over an hour – there were only a couple of staff on duty there, and only one scanner, but maybe 30-40 families were in the queue in front of us. Once inside the “family” section of security control, we were unable to turn back, and found ourselves stuck alongside lots of other families.

We made it through with 25 minutes to spare before our flight left. But because of Easy Jet’s strict arrangements for closing the gate 30 minutes before departure the flight gate was not even listed on the boards. We had to wait for half an hour for airport officials to escort us back to the other side of security/passport control and then a further hour to get back to departures. There was not enough seats on any of the Easy Jet flights before Christmas to take us to our destination so we hauled our luggage to the Eurostar at St Pancras and paid for some very expensive one way tickets to France.

Do we and the other families affected stand any chance of compensation?

Jan 30: TRIPADVISOR OPENLY ADMITS LETTING THE AIRLINE AGENTS TAKE OVER ITS FORUMS, SO OPENLY ADMITS WANTING TO HARM AIR PASSENGERS AND CAUSE UNJUST MISSING OF FLIGHTS TO HAPPEN TO THEM, INCLUDING CHILDREN. According to “Jane” of TripAdvisor support, “allegations that some of our members are representatives of the airlines, and fail to admit their affiliation while participating in the discussions” are themselves to be conveniently defined as out of order, while not answering in any way its merits as being true.

THAT PROVES IT TRUE. THAT IS OPENLY ADMITTED CONSCIOUS CONNIVANCE WITH THEM AND ACTIVE APPROVAL OF THEM, BY TRIPADVISOR. SUABLE ACTIVE APPROVAL OF COSTING TRAVELLERS MONEY, MAKING THEIR CONTRACTS AS PASSENGERS UNRELIABLE, AND DISTRESSING FAMILIES AND SMALL CHILDREN.

On 2 Oct 2013 this was posted by member Skyking in Fodor’s forum: a company that writes travel guidebooks. :

She had a return ticket and was able to show proof to immigration. $2000 is definitely enough spending money if you are staying with friends. Heck, it’s enough if you aren’t staying with friends. Not everyone rents apartments, gets picked up by car services from the airport, or eats in fancy restaurants while traveling. And do you really think every young person who comes to the UK has proof of insurance?

my advice is to stop defending yourself and stop responding to comments. You are not going to win this, and the posts are just going to get harsher and more high-handed. Anytime anyone posts a negative travel experience here, people immediately start blaming the victim: If you had a bad experience you caused it, deserved it, or both.

Now I remember why I stopped visiting this website.

This shows the evil has a longer history than just on TripAdvisor. Tragically this is why the global village of the web is not ending the nasty global apartheid of immigration control and borders, and the racists are still walking all over us. Human evil towards the troubles of others. Probably plants by the forces of traveller oppression doing tnis foul hooliganism intentionally across all travel guidance websites.

21 Apr 18: Ryanair held a plane for half an hour for one horseracing jockey, who O’Leary had an interest in.

Then they can help passengers in difficulty! they just only do when they are famous. TripAdvisor’s attitude about knock-on impacts on schedules IS SHOWN WRONG,